'Murderball' star says accident made him who he is

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By CORY MATTESON / Lincoln Journal Star

Mark Zupan, tattooed and goateed and famous, wheeled and pivoted around the center stage of the Nebraska Union Auditorium. He made sure to face each part of the audience while talking about being a new kid at lunchtime.

When he first found himself in a wheelchair, that’s how it felt, he said.

“I’m different now,” said Zupan, a star of the documentary “Murderball.”

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Mark Zupan

Mark Zupan

A former college soccer player, Zupan made the U.S. quadriplegic wheelchair rugby team while he was at Georgia Tech. He became one of the featured players in “Murderball,” a film about the team.

A drunken driving accident 14 years ago propelled Zupan, then 18, out of a truck bed and into a Florida canal, where he was found barely alive and with a broken neck.

Doctors told him he was a quadriplegic, and he started to realize that his life had changed, he said.

He realized that when he couldn’t hold a pulled pork sandwich without splattering it all over his lap, or when the Gap salesman complimented his Halloween costume, only to learn Zupan was on his first trip out of the hospital.

But he said he also realized who his friends were. They were the ones pushing all the buttons on his hospital bed, to make him dance. They were the ones tossing around his catheter bag. They were the ones who didn’t care that he was a quadriplegic, and helped him to no longer care either.

Before one of many audiences he’s addressing on a speaking tour, he spoke comfortably about his accident, and the operations that followed.

“I have a dead lady’s hip (bone) in my neck,” he announced to the audience.

Sometimes, he said, you can feel the bone move.

“Oh, thank you, Ms. Dead Lady,” he will say then. “I appreciate your hip.”

At a festival in Austin, Texas, where Zupan lives and works as a civil engineer, he was asked a question.

“What if?”

What if he hadn’t been paralyzed? That was easy, he said. There would be no bronze medal. No gold medal. No trip to the Academy Awards. No book deal.

“Plain and simple, I wouldn’t be me,” he said.

Reach Cory Matteson at (402) 473-2655 or cmatteson@journalstar.com.